Squiggle Football

Every decision in Squiggle Football is a roster decision. You build a team by drafting promising players, trading for stars, and cutting veterans whose best seasons are behind them — then you watch how those choices collide in a match engine modelled on Australian Rules Football analytics from Squiggle. The game was developed by Max Barry and released on August 13, 2025.

The structure is roguelike in a genuine sense: you fight through State Leagues toward a National League premiership, managing a Board whose patience is finite. Signing the wrong player or holding onto a fading one too long can end a run before you reach the top flight. Contract negotiations and injury lists are absent — management is deliberately abstracted to the decisions that shape a team’s identity rather than its paperwork.

Depth comes from combination. Over 850 players each interact with coaches, tactical gameplans, and team culture in ways that can snowball into something dominant or collapse into incoherence. Finding a synergy between a particular player type and a coaching setup is the central puzzle, and the pool is large enough that different runs surface genuinely different solutions.

• Deck-building recruitment: draft, trade, and delist to shape your squad each season
• Synergy-driven design: players, coaches, gameplans, and culture combine for amplified effects
• Match engine grounded in Australian Rules Football via Squiggle analytics data
• Board pressure creates a run timer — underperform and your tenure ends
• Over 850 unique players generating varied build paths across runs

Post-launch support moved quickly. The August patches — including “Brace Yourself” and “Thanks For Your Inputs” — addressed the first wave of player feedback shortly after release, followed by a September content drop in the Modern Eras DLC adding historical periods spanning the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s, which meaningfully expanded the player pool and era-specific flavour. The “State of the Nation” patch accompanied the DLC. AFL fans who want their sport represented in a genre that has largely ignored it, and deck-builder enthusiasts willing to learn a new sporting context, are the natural audience here.